A few facts about recent Korean history

Korea has never, at least in modern history, been both independent and whole. In the nineteenth century and before, Korea was a fiercely isolated “hermit kingdom”. But, because of its small stature, it owed its economic stability and military protection to China, in exchange for which a tribute was regularly paid. Unlike Japan who, having first tasted Western modernity, embraced and mastered it, Korea had to be dragged into the twentieth century by a succession of invaders racing up and down the peninsula. In 1900, Russia invaded Korea from the north and swept down to the sea before they were pushed back by Japan who invaded from the south and sent Russia back to Russia. The Japanese managed to hold on for a while. Although Koreans look on this time with revulsion, already-modernizing Japan took the opportunity to build critical infrastructure that certainly helped when Korea finally decided to pull itself into the modern era. Then, in 1945, after Japan’s surrender, Russia and the U.S. divided up Korea in much the haphazard, geographically determined, self-interested way that they divided up Germany and the rest of Europe: Russia took the top half, above the 38^th parallel, and the U.S. took the bottom half. Although this set up was supposed to be temporary, both superpowers set up (puppet) governments—competitors for legitimacy in the event of a reconciliation. The two-capital system, different from the German setup, still hinders, obviously, any plans for unification.

In 1950, after it became clear that the North and the South would never merge peacefully, Stalin okayed Kim Il Sung’s invasion of the South. This would be the first hot proxy war of the cold war. The communists pushed all the way down to the coast before MacArthur arrived at Pusan. He then launched a daring assault on Incheon, surprising the North and pushing them back to the Chinese border. But China, riled by the U.S. troops so dangerously close, sent possibly a million men into Korea from the north, and pushed the U.S. back down the peninsula until they agreed to stop at, you guessed it, the 38^th parallel. A cease-fire was called in 1953, and that is, more or less, what we are left with today.

You might say that both sides are now finally independent. With the end of the imperial era and the cold war, no countries seek to claim Korea for their own. But Korea couldn’t be more divided. With the coming of economic prosperity in the ‘80s, and the establishment of a democratic government in 1988 (the same year that Seoul hosted the Olympics), the South is now vastly different—economically, politically—than the North. Although both sides now ostensibly favor reconciliation, one can’t help thinking that the problems that are still plaguing German unification would be rehashed here many fold. If unification ever did happen, the North would have to leech off of the South for many years before any sort of stability and equality could be reached. Perhaps this is a project for our generation.